


Life In This Town

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-05-10 05:06:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5572123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dorian works too hard and smokes too much and doesn't particularly expect to find a place to belong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is another tumblr repost as part of my end of year housekeeping & another work in progress that'll update when it updates.
> 
> Any resemblance to Stockholm is purely coincidental, obviously.
> 
> Musical accompaniment:
> 
> Shoreline - Broder Daniel  
> Julian - Say Lou Lou

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fragments.

The train rattles out of the tunnel into cold grey air, offering a moment's view of the frozen river, boats under tarpaulins on the banks, the villas with their snowy gardens that stretch all the way to the water's edge. A boathouse leans drunkenly, one corner buried in the ice where its footing has given way.

Then rushing darkness.

Dorian's own reflection in the glass is smudged and indistinct. Someone tired. Eyes hollowed out to black holes.

In a metro station, a declaration of the inalienable rights of all peoples is lettered across the wall in a language his tongue still can't find the shape of. 

An older woman refuses to take the seat beside him.

 

 

"Shit," Katja says, "how do you even stand the heat back here?" and then, to the chef, "Table three wants a new steak, it's too well-done."

"It's the only place in this country I've ever been warm," Dorian says. "Like a summer day."

She rolls her eyes. "Get out front again all the same, they'll notice you're hiding."

Counting hours. You'd like to speak to my manager? Well, certainly. How will that go? Yes, Dorian Pavus is rather rude, isn't he, but so very cheap. I barely have to pay him at all. And he does have good teeth.

He smokes in a huddle with Marco out by the bins, with the stale air venting beside them, the snow melted and frozen again into a compact layer of ice underfoot.

"Why is it even necessary for a country to be this cold?" His cigarette caught between his lips as he rubs his hands together, shoves them up into his armpits. But Marco does lean closer, and that's good, that's a nice little game, warm breath against his cheek. 

In the dark the snow seems almost blue, except where lamplight stains it orange at the end of the alley. 

 

 

What did he think he was running to? Not this. Not exhausting days in terrible jobs, a single room in a small flat, light that vanishes almost as soon as it arrives. He walks between the concrete apartment buildings with their anonymous balconies and beige walls, collar of his coat turned up. In his stairwell, his footsteps echo. Slush and gravel on the doormat, edging past the considerable bulk of one of his downstairs neighbours without making eye contact, not because he's Qunari, of course not. It's only that he's too dull and blank for any of it.

Nobody else is at home. Another cigarette smoked furtively on the flat's own dull balcony. Entirely impermissible, even without the fact that he lit it with sparks from his fingers.

The city is, in darkness and from a distance, almost a little charming. The glow of windows and streetlights. As though it were comfortable. A place to enjoy living. He thinks he might enjoy it, if not for, well, circumstance.

The truth, though, is that he didn't particularly set out to run here. Not as such. He was only interested in getting _away_.

And here he is, without sufficient grounds, trading one poorly kept secret for another.

 

 

When the big things are simply too much to focus on, one gets by on irritation about the small things. There are, after all, so very _many_ small things to be irritated about: the cold, the price of clothes, the flavourless food, the price of cigarettes.

"Use snuff instead," Sera suggests. "Like a native, innit."

"Now, then," Dorian says, in horror, "let's not be so hasty."

"Oh, what, you're too good for it?" She elbows him in the side, playful.

"Certainly," he says with all possible dignity, and lifts one of her cigarettes from the battered packet in her coat pocket. "Gilded shits, remember?"

She cackles.

It does, for a few hours, help. Sera's irreverence is good, it's useful. More than anyone else he works with, she's a kind of a friend.

 

 

Sleet slides down the windows of the bus, sluggish. On the metro they're checking tickets at the gates, and maybe ID as well. He didn't stay for long enough to make sure. A ticket he has, but no permit. If he's sent home now, does he really have the resources to avoid his father? Not yet, not yet.

So it's the bus, jolting over the uneven patches of ice on the road. A long day made longer. One thing, and another, and another. If one more person looks at him in suspicion he may scream. If one more thing he can't afford to replace breaks. If—

 

 

Naturally, when he fumbles with the keys to unlock the flat, he drops his wallet and his cigarettes; turns to see them tumble between the bars of the stair rail, clattering unevenly and loudly as they go, and feels—he feels—

"Vishante kaffas," he snarls, between his teeth, and looks over the edge of the railing to see a half-familiar face staring up at him from the floor below.

His hands are shaking. He tightens one around his keys to try and hide it, shoves the other deep into his pocket. But he can do nothing about his expression. How he must look.

"Hey," the Qunari says. "You doing ok? Don't worry, I'll go grab them."

"There's no need," Dorian says, and he means to be sharp, he means to. He must look pathetic enough as it is, without making other people fetch and carry for him. A Qunari who has just heard him swearing in Tevene. He might as well do a magic trick or two while he's at it.

But the man has already gone, down the stairs two at a time and back up three.

"Look," he says, and oh, he's very tall. Broad, too. Not only the horns. The whole of him. "Seriously. Come and have some tea. Beer if you like. You need it."

And Dorian, exhausted and considering his bare-walled room with its erratic heater, is so horribly, horribly tempted to say yes.

It's the man's smile that does him in. As though he really did care that Dorian was having an entirely ridiculous day.

"I must insist," he says, "on at least having your name first." The beginning of an avalanche. Slip once, accept help once, and—and what?

"Sure," the man says, and keeps smiling that ridiculous, soft smile. "The Iron Bull. It's a pleasure."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To be seen.

Lie on a tattered brown sofa, stare at the ceiling. Ivy trails outward from a pot above the window, coaxed over hooks. Worn paint, worn floors, scratched wallpaper. Faded pink flowers on a white background.

Outside, the city is dark. Damp snow slides down the windows, distorts the glow of the streetlights. The clatter and scrape of a snow plough, far away.

The Iron Bull's flat is a mirror of Dorian's in its form, balcony door to the right of the living room window instead of the left, the L-shape of the hall bent in the other direction. The same floor plan, inverted; the same 1950s cabinets and elderly white stove in the kitchen. Huge southern windows made to catch what fragments of winter sun exist. But they are utterly unalike in their impressions. 

This chaos is a welcoming one.

How does a thing like this become normal?

He is hardly friends with the Bull, can barely maintain civility. And still he is given invitations; still he accepts them. A week, another, another. A night here and there. Drinks, usually. Food, increasingly.

Sniping. Inconsequential things. Clothing, taste in literature, taste in films. Nothing deeper. They touch only the surfaces of each other's lives, and find little enough to agree about there. But the disagreements are well enough. 

They're something to do.

Loneliness clouds his judgement, perhaps. Or it could be the other thing, the old secret that he could never, ever persuade himself to try and keep. 

But he hasn't made a habit of fucking people he dislikes for, oh, a good decade now.

Well then: a cheap can of beer, but not at least a weak one, pulled not from a grocery bag but from the distinctive purple carrier bag of the company. 

It is all perfectly ordinary, in this strange new status quo. And then it isn't. 

"So," the Bull says, as Dorian sighs and deposits the half-empty can on the table. "You don't like me much, huh?"

An unpleasantly hot sensation at the base of the throat, clavicles to sternum.

Dorian considers the great sweeping loops of the ivy, the strange blue stain half a metre from the ceiling lamp under its flimsy paper shade. The paint has bubbled a little around its edges.

"What do you expect me to say to that?"

"Hey, whatever you want. It's all good. You don't have to like me. I just like to know where I stand with people. Call it habit."

One, two, three tendrils curled around each other, forming a strange whorl of leaves. The bright green of new growth at the heart of it, softened a little towards yellow by the lack of sun.

Dorian's face pulls of its own accord into what he's sure is a reasonably undignified expression of distaste. "Is it also habit to feed people you suspect of despising you?"

"It's habit to feed people who look like they need it."

"Ah," Dorian says. "A charity case. I see. How altruistic of you."

"Everyone needs a hand sometimes," the Bull says. "No shame in that."

"I'm managing perfectly well, thank you," Dorian says, and if his tone is acid, the untruth of the statement is blatant enough that the Bull fails to take outward offense. Or perhaps he's simply impossible to offend.

A terrible, petty part of Dorian wants to take that as a challenge.

"Sure," the Bull says. "I don't mean that you won't get through, or I don't think you're tough enough. Doesn't mean you should have to make it alone."

"What, exactly, is it that you believe my problem is?" Dorian asks; and oh, yes, he's looking to fight. He so often is. He so seldom really has the freedom to.

"Don't know exactly," the Bull says. "I guess it could just be regular prejudice. I'm going to say that's not all, though. Guy like you, you're bloody-minded. You'd figure that shit out one way or another, I'd think. But you're living in a third-hand flat, sharing it with people you never talk to. You don't have a proper winter coat or shoes. You're upper class, and Tevinter, so you've got to be a mage. You're not from a country that's considered a war zone." 

Dorian looks sharply across at him, flicks his gaze quickly away to the ceiling again. Feels the bitter taste of alcohol and bile in the back of his throat.

He _knows_. Somehow, he knows.

How does one speak. Form words, say something cutting, dismissive—

Panic is something cold and hard just above his stomach, growing, pressing down, pressing out against his ribs. It robs him of air, of movement.

It is possible—it must be possible—to breathe.

"I'm sure whatever theory you have is fascinating and absurd," he says. A thin, thready imitation of his own voice.

An imitation of himself.

"Yeah," the Bull says. Nothing more, for a moment. But his hand taps Dorian's legs, nudges them out the way so that the Bull can settle himself heavily onto the sofa.

Absurdly, he lays Dorian's legs across his lap.

"So," he says, pats Dorian's knee before moving his hands away. "Deep breaths. I'm not here to fuck you over."

"You're Qunari," Dorian says.

"Tal-Vashoth," the Bull corrects. Harshness. The Bull doesn't like the taste of the words, Dorian thinks, and this too is absurd. Would that he had drunk more. He could do with a little less clarity right now.

He breathes.

" _Were_ Qunari," Dorian says. "I know what the Qun does to mages on Seheron. Would you care to sew my mouth shut, perhaps? Or will getting me expelled from the country be sufficient?"

"I'm not here to fuck you over," the Bull repeats. "Look. I know people without documents. Some of my kids—" he trails off, shrugs massively, the sofa creaking a little. Absurd, absurd, absurd.

"Children," Dorian says. "Really?"

The Bull laughs, just as though this was a perfectly cordial conversation, and not Dorian starting a fight and then forgetting how to breathe when the bait was taken. "Not how you're thinking. Never had a family. Kids from my job."

"Ah."

The pressure in Dorian's chest is slowly easing. Inexplicably, inadvisedly. Oh, certainly. Trust a man's words because they sound good.

Or trust them because he's been nothing but kind.

Well, hasn't one gotten into trouble in that particular manner before? 

Halward Pavus' face, turned hard and cold. Can one, in truth, know another person at all?

"Had a damn shitty time getting residency myself," the Bull says. "Come on. You want another drink? Don't have much else home, but I can dig something out."

Oh, he does.

Cold food from the day before, snaps in glasses incongruously decorated with what might be lobsters, or crayfish.

"What do you say," Dorian murmurs, feeling steadier. "If you don't take the whole—"

The Bull laughs again. He laughs so much, although his face is often still; might seem rather harsh, out of context. "No half-measures? Hey, take as much as you like. Or as little. No point posturing. Not everyone likes to take it all in one go."

There is a tiny, tiny hint of innuendo in there, in the shift of his tone. Not overly pronounced. Not taken as far as it could be.

The bizarreness of the thing is that Dorian has never yet known the Bull to be subtle about anything; was shocked the first time the Bull talked easily about sex as though it were as ordinary as watching a film. 

How used he is to being the most scandalous person in any given room.

"Don't be ludicrous," he says, more to the subtext than the content, and drains his glass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If this were Stockholm, the entity referred to as "the company" would be systembolaget, the state-run chain which has a monopoly on the sale of alcohol above 3.5% volume. You know. Theoretically.
> 
> The exchange at the end refers more specifically, if obliquely, to the drinking song "helan går." Den som inte helan tar, han heller inte halvan får. Down the whole shot or you won't get the half.
> 
> Drink more responsibly than Scandinavians.


End file.
